Ordinary Systems By David Foster Wallace Analysis

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S TOR Y THE AWAKENING OF ~1YINTEREST IN ANNULAR SYSTEMS'* By David Foster Wallace n the winter of 1963 I remember I was eating lunch and reading something dull on temperature reactivity coefficients when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato-juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn't yet removed the television makeup that gave his face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and rinsed my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were both in there. The master…show more content…
My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We could tell she was getting out of our way. My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door. I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress . and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost frighteningly quick and perceptive. He went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, "I want to let's just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to maneuver." "Right," I said. My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents' bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked them between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, his side of which rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded ninety degrees, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress's overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I"spread my arms and took the impact with my chest and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector. The mattress, a Simmons Beautyrest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed's box spring. I remember visualizingand considering this triangle. My legswere trembling under the mattress's canted weight. My father was exhorting me to hold and support the mattress. The
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